[odf-discuss] Mass may endorse OXML.

[marbux]

On 7/4/07, Daniel Carrera <daniel.carrera at zmsl.com> wrote:
>
> marbux wrote:
> > The idea was to switch all instances of MS Office in the state to save
> > to ODF rather than to Microsoft formats, which would have ended the
> > lock-in and,
>
> An "ODF" that is packed with foreign metadata that you were unable to
> translate and is completely unknown would merely replace MS Office
> lock-in by "MS Office + Foundation plugin" lock-in.
>
> > But it fell apart when the big ODF vendors that had been asked by
> > Massachusetts to fund the Foundation's development of its plug-in
> > declined to do so
>
> You are telling us that the state of Massachusetts asked Sun and IBM to
> give you (the Foundation) money for your product?


And Oracle and Novell, although it was before I was involved. But yes, I've
seen lots of paperwork on the subject. Former Massachusetts CIO Louis was
informed on October 3, 2006 that the big vendors wouldn't agree to provide
the funding and he submitted his resignation the next day. <
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9003866
>.

> and Sun refused to modify StarOffice/OpenOffice.org so
> > they woud preserve foreign elements and attributes instead of destroying
> > them.
>
> Nevermind the fact that your demand that unknown elements be preserved
> is technically unfeasible.


Sure, that's why WordPerfect has been using virtually the same system since
WordPerfect 6 to achieve both backward and *forward* interoperability across
WP 6 and all all later versions. Obivously, they use it because they wanted
to do something that was infeasible. Open a WP 12 complex document in WP 6,
turn on Reveal Codes, and look for the <unknown> tags. They're only there to
prove that the Novell and Corel engineers wanted to mess up the program.

And that's why the Foundation used the foreign elements and attributes in
the da Vinci plug-in to round-trip between ODF and Microsoft formats in MS
Office, so they could do something that's a complete waste of time.

What do you think the section 1.5 foreign elements and attributes are for,
Daniel? And why does the spec say, "[c]onforming applications that read and
write documents ** may preserve foreign elements and attributes" if -- as
you say -- it's unfeasible to do so? And why does the same section also say:

"Foreign elements *may* have an office:process-content attribute attached
that has the value true or false. If the attribute's value is true, or if
the attribute does not exist, the element's content *should* be processed by
conforming applications. Otherwise conforming applications *should
not*process the element's content, but
*may* only preserve its content."

Yeah, totally unfeasible. Right.





Daniel.
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